"A country boy who was well liked, friendly, respected, hard working and honest. He would gladly have given you the shirt off his back," she told the summit.

But he had gradually slipped into drinking more and more alcohol, eventually drinking methylated spirits.

In between, he would go into detoxification centres and see counsellors. But doctors could not give Ms Jackson any information about her husband.

Even when he had forgotten which hospital he had made an appointment at, no one would speak to his wife.

Ms Jackson tried to get her husband admitted to a secure rehabilitation facility under an old law, the Inebriates Act of 1912, which has not been used in decades because no such facilities exist in NSW.

"Why did the system stop me from helping him?" she said.

"It is illegal to commit suicide. Then why isn't it against the law to drink yourself to death?" she said, choking back tears.

But the summit also heard how tough it was for doctors and nurses dealing with the effect of alcohol in hospital emergency wards and departments.

A trauma specialist from the emergency department at Liverpool Hospital, John Crozier, told the summit about failing to resuscitate a four-year-old boy hit by a drunk driver, and then having to tell his parents. "A chilling experience," he said.

At other times, Dr Crozier has had to resuscitate people shot after a drunken brawl.

Once, he helped amputate the arm of a woman whom others had given up for dead.

She had been in a car accident with a drunk driver.

After a patient died, it was left to the nurses to clean up before helping the relatives to identify the body. "They clean the corpses of vomit, faeces and blood," he said.

Nurses were also often "sworn at, punched, bitten or vomited at" by patients, he said.

In a separate session, which was closed to the media, alcoholics, family and young people talked about the impact of alcohol on their lives.